Demand planning is used to forecast the demand for products. Characteristic Based Forecasting (CBF) is a technique used in particular in demand planning. In CBF a set of characteristics is defined in order to forecast components of assembled products. The set of characteristics is called the CBF characteristics, and may also be referred to as the product dependent characteristics. For example, if the product is a car, the product dependent characteristics of the car may include colour and engine size. Products having product dependent characteristics are referred to as configurable products. In demand planning however, other product characteristics are also typically taken into account, such as sales region and customer channels. Such other product characteristics are referred to as product independent characteristics. In CBF it is known to perform a drill down with respect to a certain product. A drill down is a technique carried out, for example, for a particular product for assessing the incidence of a certain product with respect to a certain product characteristic. For example, a drill down may be carried out to assess how many red cars are sold. The drill down is a useful tool in demand planning because a drill down on a characteristic enables the user to display and maintain the forecast data for all the values of this characteristic at the same time. Further a drill down permits a percentage representation of the data to be accessed.
It has been found that conventional demand planning incorporating characteristics based forecasting suffer drawbacks. One problem is that drill down on a characteristic is challenging because conventionally it is performed when a large amount of data are displayed and maintained and because in the case of the CBF, the required calculations for the different levels of data are complicated due to the CBF specific logic. In particular, it has been found that these problems with conventional demand planning incorporating characteristics based forecasting render it impossible to perform a drill down in demand planning on product independent characteristics. This is limiting in terms of the information the user can readily access from the system.
It is an object of the present invention to address those problems encountered in conventional demand planning incorporating characteristics based forecasting.